8 reasons anarchists are voting Yes to Repeal the hated 8th

On May 25th we in Ireland finally get to vote to Repeal the hated 8th amendment. Here we present the 8 reasons WSM members are voting Yes to Repeal along with many of the articles we have published on the issue in recent months.

WSM members are Voting YES to Repeal because;

1. The decision on whether to continue a pregnancy is one for the pregnant person to make. It is not a decision of the gang of busybodies that were & are against marriage equality, contraception, sex education, divorce and access to secular education.

2. There are people for whom travel to access abortion in Britain isn't an option or hasn't been in the past because of migration status, abusive relationships and poverty.

3. Pregnant people have to illegally take abortion pills in Ireland. In doing so they face the fear that the pills will be intercepted in the post, alongside the fear of prosecution which could result in a 14 year jail sentence.

4. The referendum is also about what sort of Ireland we want. The No campaign wants to return us to an Ireland of the past where a woman’s place was the home providing reproductive labour. Nothing was to interfere with this hence the bans on divorce, contraception, working while married etc.

5. No one should have to suffer while they are waiting for their child to die inside them, not knowing if he or she is in pain or if that movement was normal or the last throes of death. (Testimony from a FFA parent who travelled).

6. Few of us were old enough to vote in 1983. Now we finally get to vote to get rid of something that has made life so much harder for so many of the women in our lives, including delaying or denying medical care to pregnant people.

7. The anti-choice groups are a gang of bullies who associate with the far right. They came after us with injunctions in the 1980s for distributing information and hurleys in 1992 for speaking out for choice. We've watched them threaten, lie and assault people across four decades.

8. The so-called moral position for ‘pro-lifers’ is hypocrisy. They are using this struggle to force women to remain pregnant, regardless of their circumstances. These people have no interest in life. They don’t support the people in crisis pregnancy. They only offer judgement, shame and oppression.

Turn out and change Ireland with us on May 25th with your Yes vote.

Our activity for Repeal

Repeal has been our major activity since March with every member of WSM involved at some level. We took the decision to direct almost all of this involvement through Together for Yes (T4Y) so you won't have seen WSM printed material, e.g. posters, and we are not doing our own public meetings, and so forth. All that sort of work and help with organising tasks is instead being done as volunteers with Together for Yes, a range of work from organising local groups to packing merch in HQ to leafletting and canvassing, you'll find some reports from this work towards the end.

It's not too late to get involved, in the Marriage Equality campaign the largest canvasses were in the closing days, volunteer to canvass with T4Y now and those already doing so will be delighted by fresh faces. With less than 14 days to go the weekend saw huge canvass teams take to the streets with many first timers along and its expected they will continue to grow right up to the eve of the vote.

The exception to this is our online media. This is because we have built up a huge reach with 100,000 followers across our various social media platforms. We have been using our considerable online reach to amplify T4Y messaging. It also allows us to say the things that T4Y as a broad campaign might have difficulty expressing, for example explaining that the referendum comes from an anti-establishment revolt that forced the politicans into calling it.

Our online campaign started on the 7th of March, the eve of International Womens' Day and between then and May 9th our own tweets appeared 1.7 million times on peoples feeds. We probably added at least twice that, through retweeting, to T4Y reach as well as other campaign groups including Termination For Medical Reasons, Amnesty, MERJ etc.

Our top Tweet was sent on March 20th, reaching 60,000, it warned about the dark ad campaigns that were coming and provided examples later used by journalists from The Times, C4 News and other publications in their coverage leading to the decision by Facebook & Google to ban online referendum advertising.

The 2nd most popular Tweet was from March 11th where we proved that only 9,000 people had taken part in the 'Rally 4 Life' and not the 100,000 claimed by organisers. This reached 51,000 and was important in establishing early on that claims from the No camp needed to be investigated rather than reported as fact, as much of the media were doing.

Both our facebook pages have been busy posting unique content written by our members about the referendum, some of which is now archived here on our website. Solidarity Times had 46,000 engagements last month alone, reaching 72,000 people in Ireland. Our Workers Solidarity Movement page had 65,000 engagements over the last month. An engagment is a like, share or comment. We've also been providing photography and video coverage, with video we have shot appearing in several Yes campaign related videos including this great version of Phil Och's When I'm Gone by Shift Work.

You can read a selection of those articles below. We are not running paid ads so we are entirely reliant on people engaging with our articles to reach people. So if you like one be sure to Like, Share, Retweet or comment to get it out to more people, we estimate each time you do that has a similar extra reach to us spending 1-10 euro on paid ads.

We are an anarchist organistion founded in 1984 by people who had campaigned against the 8th amendment. We have been involved in pro-choice struggles ever since as part of our wide ranging solidarity with struggles and organising for an anarchist future.

The papers below capture our collective positions on class, patriarchy and intersecting issues, if you want to keep in cotnact with us post-referendum sign up on our email system at www.wsm.ie/user/register

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Kommentare (2 de 2)

Anarchists aren't against voting as a method of decision making if its direct - ie you get to vote on the decisions itself. They are generally against indirect decision making, that is where you vote to trust someone to make a decision for you, as is the case with almost all elections

Saturday the 30th of September 2017 will go down as a high point in the fight for abortion rights in the Republic of Ireland, and that is a struggle that stretches back decades. Years of campaigning and maintaining a focus on the issue, saw a massive crowd of nearly 30,000 people take to the streets for the annual March for Choice as organised by the Abortion Rights Campaign [ARC]. The calls are for action, and the need for Repeal of the 8th Amendment which bans abortion in almost all circumstances.

The Workers Solidarity Movement in Ireland is in full support of the protests in Brussels on the 28th September demanding a guaranteed, free, and accessible access to abortion across Europe. The EU has stood by idly while the bodily autonomy of pregnant people continues to be violated by some member states including Ireland and Malta. It has similarly done nothing while other member states progressively attack reproductive rights based on the political whimsy of the controlling parties of ever-increasing conservative governments. We hope the this mobilisation will demonstrate the united commitment to reproductive freedom for all.

We stand with you in spirit as we prepare for our own mobilisation on the 30th of September for the Dublin March for Choice and it appears almost certain a constitutional referendum to remove the ban on abortion next summer. The text that follows is our position paper on abortion rights agreed by WSM national conference this summer.

Every year in either Dublin or Belfast the pro and anti choice movements come head to head around the so called ‘Rally for Life’. This year it was Dublin’s unwilling role to play host to the bigot parade. It mattered more years than many as a referendum on the hated 8th Amendment that bans abortion is promised for next year. It could be that the next Dublin bigot parade scheduled for 2019 will come after they have suffered a major defeat.

International Womens Day in Ireland saw thousands take to the streets in a sequence of 'in work time' protests under the heading 'Strike4Repeal'. Abortion is illegal in almost all circumstances and the protests were an attempt by pro-choice activists to forced the government to stop delaying a referendum to repeal the anti-choice 8th Amendment placed in the Irish constitution in 1983. Workers Solidarity Movement members took part in organising the day and in the aftermath produced a number of articles and videos detailing what happened.

Amnesty International is holding its International Council Meeting in Dublin this week and earlier today many of the delegate attending staged a protest at the Dail (Irish Parliament) against the criminalisation of women under Ireland's anti-choice laws.

A couple of hundred people came to the pro choice solidarity rally in Dublin, Ireland last nigh organised by the WSMt. It was called to protest against the prosecution of a women in Belfast for supplying her daughter with the abortion pill.

News broke on the 19th June that a Belfast woman is to stand trial for helping her daughter procure an abortion. In response on 24th June a letter was handed in signed by 215 abortion activists admitting that they are guilty of breaking the law by either taking or helping someone procure the Early Medical Abortion (EMA) pill.

This is as complete a story about what happened to 'Migrant X' that we are aware of. Migrant X is a young migrant women who it emerged was refused an abortion by the Irish state despite apparently meeting the grounds of the X-case legislation and instead forced to carry the pregnancy and agree to a C-section. The pregnanacy itself was the result of rape, Migrant X attempted suicide after being refused the abortion and later went on a hunger and thirst strike. Once what had happened to her became known there were sizeable pro-choice solidarity demonstrations called across Ireland and at Irish embassies overseas.
We have been given information that the migrant woman at the centre of the current forced pregnancy was 'committed' to a psychiatric hospital following her initial request for termination. It’s already known that the initial request was made when she was 8 weeks pregnant. It was this crucial period in which she was being held incommunicado which led directly to the Caesarian option being possible to impose as an ‘alternative’ to allowing her to access the abortion she had asked for.

The announcement that there will be a referendum to decriminalise abortion in Ireland is the product of decades of active campaigning. Pro-choice campaigners built for repeal ever since the hated 8th amendment was entered into the Constitution in 1983, putting a ban on abortion, which was already illegal in the country, into the constitution. If at first this seemed like a distant demand now repeal looks by far the most likely outcome in May. The story of how this happened illustrates how change comes in general. That is not through elections but through people getting organised to demand that change, regardless of which politicians happen to be running the show in any particular year.

On 14th October 2017, Rally for Choice will march through the streets of Belfast. - Last year saw us counter protest the Rally for Life in the North of Ireland, for the first time we marched against their lies instead of our usual static demo. Our counter protest was a huge success, despite being organised at short notice and with only a handful of activists. The protest burst across our streets and convened at Buoy Park afterwards for speakers. We outnumbered the Rally for Life 2016 significantly.

This is the Workers Solidarity Movement position paper on Abortion Rights as collectively agreed at July 2017 WSM National Conference. This position paper sits under the Patriarchy paper which in turn is under the Anarchism, Oppression & Exploitation paper, and hence does not repeat any of that material in these.

Next week will see the promotion of Fermanagh & South Tyrone MLA (Member of Northern Ireland Assembly), Arlene Foster to the position of DUP leader and the North of Ireland’s First Minister. Foster is a woman who was once described to have “learned a lot from the likes of Thatcher when it comes to dealing with men in politics."

Over 1,000 abortion pills were seized last year at customs, a figure that represents double the amount seized the two years previous. This fact is very much in contradiction with the myth of the anti-choice side that there is no demand for abortion in Ireland.

The Workers Solidarity Movement in Ireland is in full support of the protests in Brussels on the 28th September demanding a guaranteed, free, and accessible access to abortion across Europe. The EU has stood by idly while the bodily autonomy of pregnant people continues to be violated by some member states including Ireland and Malta. It has similarly done nothing while other member states progressively attack reproductive rights based on the political whimsy of the controlling parties of ever-increasing conservative governments. We hope the this mobilisation will demonstrate the united commitment to reproductive freedom for all.

We stand with you in spirit as we prepare for our own mobilisation on the 30th of September for the Dublin March for Choice and it appears almost certain a constitutional referendum to remove the ban on abortion next summer. The text that follows is our position paper on abortion rights agreed by WSM national conference this summer.

So what are exactly are we proud of? Is it just that we are attracted to a particular gender or genders? Or, are we proud of our courageous history of struggles as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered/ LGBT/ Queer people for our rights, and against bigotry, oppression and hatred?